Between them runs a wire

“The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never!” — Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita¹

The sentence hangs in the air like a warning and a promise, because two pairs of eyes—Katherine Mansfield’s fever-bright gaze and Maria Stepanova’s wary, exilic stare—keep returning across a century of European weather. One woman lay in French sanatorium rooms while her lungs filled and her notebooks thickened; the other carries a laptop and a refugee’s bag through airports after Vladimir Putin’s war turned critique into treason. Mansfield wrote within parlours, gardens and rented rooms, where women heard their own thoughts with a new, alarming volume. Stepanova writes from archives, train compartments, war reports and online platforms, where memory and testimony become weapons against a state that calls its own violence love of country. Between them runs a wire: a charged filament of feminism that refuses slogans yet reorders reality, one close look at a woman’s life after another.

Katherine Mansfield’s biography reads at first glance like a pattern drawn for a colonial daughter who stepped into metropolitan brilliance, yet every turn of that pattern carries an insurgent angle. Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington in 1888, third child of a banker who would rise to chair the Bank of New Zealand and receive a knighthood, she grew inside a household that trusted money, decorum and empire.² Karori’s fields and the tense gentility of Wellington parlours poured into her early stories, while the move to London at fifteen opened a different theatre: Queen’s College, cello lessons, French Symbolist reading, first experiments in print.² At the same time desire complicated the script. Her passionate attachments to women such as the Māori heiress Maata Mahupuku and the English artist Edith Bendall, alongside affairs with men and a disastrous marriage she fled on the wedding night, established a life that defied Edwardian prescriptions for feminine decorum even before her fiction began to test those limits on the page.³

Tuberculosis arrived in 1917 and tightened its grip; through migrations between England, France and Switzerland, through Gurdjieff’s Institute at Fontainebleau in the final months, she pursued an art of short fiction whose focus fell again and again upon women standing at thresholds: between girlhood and marriage, between class obedience and class disgust, between the body’s appetite and the mind’s imposed shame.⁴

The stories that secured her place within modernism—“Prelude”, “At the Bay”, “Bliss”, “The Garden Party”, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”—shape feminism less as doctrine and more as nervous system.⁵ “Prelude” and “At the Bay” return to the Beauchamp household recast as the Burnells, where Linda, Beryl, the children and the servants occupy a landscape rich with sea light and morning chores; every domestic act carries a second register. Linda’s pregnancy pulls her bed into a raft of exhaustion; Beryl grooms herself for male attention while her inner monologue strains against the smallness of available choices.⁵ The father, Stanley, strides through with hearty demands and mild bullying, yet the narrative gaze seldom grants him the dignity of full centrality. Mansfield’s free indirect style slides into the women’s minds and the children’s imaginations, so that patriarchal authority appears as noise at the edge of a richer frequency.⁶ Feminism here moves as an electric undercurrent, an awareness that the distribution of comfort and pain in the family serves men first, while the emotional labour and erotic frustration of the women feed a system that praises their patience and misreads their silence. In “Bliss”, Bertha’s ecstatic attraction to Pearl Fulton, entwined with her naïve delight in her own marriage, breaks into horror when she realises husband and friend share a secret; desire between women arrives as both miracle and diagnostic instrument, tracing the hollowness of heterosexual security with one shattering insight.⁵

Mansfield’s feminism therefore aligns less with suffrage placards and more with a slow recalibration of whose sensations matter. Contemporary feminist criticism often remarks that her female characters appear paralysed or victimised; yet the paralysis usually belongs to the social forms around them, while their perceptions intensify.⁷ Laura in “The Garden Party” walks downhill from a lavish lawn to a dead workman’s cottage and experiences, with bewildered clarity, the indecency of class insulation.⁵ Her hesitation over the party hat and the dead man’s young wife signals more than girlish confusion; it announces an embryonic ethical sense that refuses to reduce the labouring poor to scenery. Mansfield’s technique—those glancing, lyrical shifts in interior monologue, those endings that refuse closure—enacts a feminist suspicion toward any narrative that offers simple moral arithmetic.⁶ She extends full imaginative attention to women who stand within seemingly “ordinary” circumstances and reveals how each tea tray, each curtain, each garden chair carries a history of who serves whom. Through that attention, domestic life ceases to appear natural and begins to read as performance, one that female consciousness can accept, adapt or quietly sabotage.

Across the continent and across a century, Maria Stepanova inherits a different map of constraint and resistance. Born in Moscow in 1972, poet, essayist and novelist, she emerged during the final Soviet years and the chaotic 1990s, gaining recognition through experimental verse and through her role as founder and editor-in-chief of Colta.ru, an independent online magazine that covered culture and politics with a rare mixture of irony and moral seriousness.⁸ Her monumental work In Memory of Memory interlaces family documents, travel notes and reflections on twentieth-century catastrophe into a hybrid that many readers experience as both novel and essay,⁸ while poetry books such as War of the Beasts and the Animals and Holy Winter 20/21 braid lyric intensity with commentary on conflict in Ukraine and the suffocating winter of Russian authoritarianism.⁹ ¹⁰ After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she wrote “The War of Putin’s Imagination” for the Financial Times, a piece that traced the invasion to a long cultivation of imperial fantasy within Russian public life, and joined the first wave of writers who spoke against the war and the regime’s entire political course.¹³

Pressures on independent media and explicit threats turned dissent into exile; Stepanova now lives abroad, one figure among an expanding constellation of Russian women whose work rejects both the war and the patriarchy that drives it.⁸ ¹³

Stepanova’s feminism grows from this double engagement with history and present violence. Russian feminists after 2012, and especially after 2022, have developed a language that links domestic abuse, homophobia, workplace inequality and war as symptoms of one patriarchal order.¹¹ Manifestos by the Feminist Anti-War Resistance describe feminism as the most resilient opposition movement inside Russia, with dozens of groups across many cities, while recent scholarship tracks a shift from celebrity feminism toward grassroots anti-war activism led by women who frame invasion as an extreme form of gendered domination.¹¹ ¹² Stepanova stands inside this mental landscape, even when her work seldom employs the word “feminism” as banner. In In Memory of Memory, she follows a lineage of Jewish and Russian relatives—great-aunts, grandmothers, cousins—whose lives passed through pogroms, Stalinist terror, Nazi occupation and late-Soviet stagnation, and whose photographs and notebooks survive as fragile proofs that existence exceeded state categories.⁸ The narrator’s “I” emerges as a composite of those women’s endurance and creative intelligence; the project models a form of feminist subjectivity that treats domestic archives as armour against erasure and patriarchal myth. Where Mansfield turned family houses into stages for crises of feeling, Stepanova turns family papers into an insurgent historiography, demonstrating that a woman who reads her own ancestors carefully acquires a vantage point from which current autocrats appear temporary and crude.⁸ ¹³

Family therefore becomes a shared pressure point in both lives, although the surrounding political orders differ. Mansfield grew up inside a respectable New Zealand dynasty whose prosperity reached back into colonial settlement and forward into imperial finance; stories such as “Prelude” and “At the Bay” reframe that dynasty as the Burnells, a clan whose comfort depends on servants and on women whose aspirations receive gentle ridicule or worried policing.² ⁴ The grandmother’s authority, Linda’s languor, Beryl’s small acts of flirtation, the children’s responsive terror and excitement—each strand reveals how patriarchy distributes roles yet also how women collaborate, compete and console one another within that distribution.⁵ The younger brother Leslie’s death in the First World War fractures Mansfield’s sense of family continuity; later stories feel haunted by absent sons and by sisters who inhabit a future thick with grief.⁴

Stepanova’s family history stretches over the convulsions of twentieth-century Russia, so that every trunk of letters opens onto displacement and survival. In Memory of Memory follows relatives from Odessa and Kherson through evacuations, cultural work and quiet acts of dissent; aunts translate, sew, queue, read, hide, and sometimes fall silent from exhaustion, yet the book refuses to flatten them into noble victims.⁸ Instead it honours their occasional compromises alongside their intelligence, their sense of style, their jokes, their superstitions. The result aligns with Mansfield’s own impulse to grant her female characters capacity for pettiness, cruelty, aspiration and ambivalence—all the dispositions traditionally reserved for male protagonists.⁵ ¹⁵ Feminism here takes the form of full moral complexity assigned to women within family narratives. Mansfield’s Beauchamps/Burnells and Stepanova’s sprawling clan each show how a woman who comes after inherits both constraint and technique: a repertoire of ways to endure, to forget, to remember against pressure, to speak indirectly when direct protest risks expulsion or death.² ⁸ ¹¹

Love and the body, in both careers, pass through politics even when the scene appears intimate. Mansfield’s diaries record passionate longing for women alongside romance with men, and her fiction stages desire as force that unsettles the borders between respectable wife, coquettish sister and secret rebel.³ Bertha’s longing for Pearl in “Bliss”, Linda’s mingled resentment and need toward her husband’s sexual demands, Beryl’s hunger for admiration in “At the Bay”: each episode honours erotic experience as central to women’s sense of self, yet also shows how social scripts squeeze that experience into marriage plots or pathologise it as hysteria.⁵ ⁶ Tuberculosis then inscribes politics directly upon Mansfield’s body. Her refusal of a sanatorium, her decision to keep writing while moving from Bandol to Looe to Switzerland and Fontainebleau, her engagement with Gurdjieff’s teachings as a way to think through pain and purpose—each gesture presents female authorship as a wager that the mind and the pen may still shape meaning even while the body deteriorates.⁴ ⁷

Stepanova’s own intimate life remains far less public, yet her work circles the battered bodies of others with relentless care. Holy Winter 20/21 inhabits the pandemic winter in Moscow, with protests, arrests and state media lies gathering around everyday illness; poems from that volume and from War of the Beasts and the Animals interweave animals, soldiers, neighbours and ghosts into a landscape where bodies rarely receive safety yet repeatedly improvise solidarity.⁹ ¹⁰ Her journalistic essays and interventions link the invasion of Ukraine to a long pattern of disregard for individual bodies in Russian political culture.¹³ When she describes photographs of bombed-out Kharkiv streets and a woman rushing with her dog toward a shelter, she refuses distance; those images join the family archive as further evidence of an order that treats people as expendable scenery.¹³ In contemporary Russia, queer women writers, feminist poets and journalists mark their own bodies as targets simply by speaking; exile often follows, and in some cases, as with fellow writer Elena Kostyuchenko, suspected poisoning enters the story of female authorship.¹⁴ Through friendship and shared causes, Stepanova’s work participates in that larger field where Russian womanhood and opposition to Putin’s regime intertwine so tightly that one cannot separate gender from courage.¹¹ ¹³ ¹⁴

Against the backdrop of European feminism, these two writers frame a long arc of transformation and backlash. Mansfield wrote while suffrage campaigns advanced in Britain and New Zealand, yet her stories seldom depict marches or political speeches; instead they attend to the interior consequences of a world that still assumed marriage as a woman’s primary horizon.² ⁴ In Edwardian and Georgian London, feminism frequently arrived through reading circles, friendships and private experiments in living; Mansfield forged her own pattern by refusing domestic settlement, by accepting an unconventional marriage with John Middleton Murry that allowed parallel careers, and by writing women who question their circumstances without preaching.² ³ ⁴ Twenty-first-century Europe counts legal equality, widespread higher education for women and public #MeToo reckonings among its features, yet also witnesses powerful nationalist and religious movements that seek to reimpose hierarchical gender orders.¹³ In Putin’s Russia, that reaction hardens into doctrine: state media deride feminism as foreign corruption; officials present “traditional values” as bulwark against decadence, while legal structures shrink the space for independent organising.¹¹ ¹³ When Russian feminists frame anti-war protest as defence of women and children against militarised masculinity, they extend Mansfield’s quiet question—who pays for male adventure?—into an accusation addressed to a nuclear power.¹¹ ¹² ¹³

Form mirrors politics in both cases. Mansfield’s short stories employ oblique point of view, ellipsis and lyrical description to unsettle the reader’s trust in any single authority; episodes unfold through the perceptions of children, servants, anxious daughters, bewildered hostesses.⁵ ⁶ The narrative line often ends in a moment of suspended comprehension, as when Laura stands in the poor cottage after the garden party or when the spinster sisters in “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” confront an empty future that their upbringing has left them unequipped to inhabit.⁵ Feminism arises here through method: women are granted the position of central consciousness, while male power appears as habit, tone of voice, inherited furniture.⁶ ¹⁵ Stepanova, for her part, builds long hybrid texts that braid essay, lyric, travelogue and micro-biographies of forgotten figures; she mistrusts singular narratives and instead orchestrates constellations of fragments.⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ In Memory of Memory spends pages on ticket stubs, marginalia, marginal women artists and minor bureaucrats, in order to show how history accumulates inside small, feminised labours of preservation.⁸ ¹² The refusal of a clean, linear story about Russia echoes her refusal of any ideology that sacrifices living individuals for abstractions such as “Great Power” or “holy victory.”¹² ¹³ In both oeuvres, literary form trains the reader to value lateral connections, small voices and unheroic endurance—qualities central to feminist ethics.⁶ ¹¹ ¹²

Bulgakov’s line about the tongue and the eyes returns here with fresh weight. Patriarchal orders, whether Edwardian or Putinist, rely upon controlled speech: rules about what a respectable woman may say, which historical episodes the citizen may name, which crimes acquire legal status.¹¹ ¹³ Mansfield’s women learn to speak around what they know; yet their eyes register each humiliation, each absurdity, and the narrative camera honours that gaze.⁵ ⁶ Stepanova inhabits a Russia where official tongues still mould public speech, yet where eyes have consumed images from Chechnya, Beslan, Donbas, Bucha; her essays insist that these visions settle in the soul and affect responsibility, even when propaganda tries to smother comprehension.¹³ Feminism, in this twin perspective, appears less as a separate cause and more as a demand that every structure—family, state, literature itself—answer to the truths those eyes perceive: the unequal distribution of care, the routine sacrifice of women’s time and bodies, the way imperial projects feed on compulsory motherhood and compulsory silence.¹¹ ¹² ¹³

One might imagine a final encounter to bind their legacies. Mansfield walks down a corridor in Fontainebleau, wrapped in a shawl, breath tight yet stubborn; Stepanova steps off an overnight train in a European capital, laptop heavy in her bag, unread messages from friends back in Moscow buzzing on her phone. Each carries a packet of pages: a story about a girl who sees through a garden party, a draft of an essay on guilt and responsibility. They share a brief glance in some impossible station where past and present connect. No manifesto passes between them, only recognition: that womanhood in Europe, from colonial Wellington to wartime Moscow, gains strength through those who record domestic secrets and state crimes with equal seriousness; that feminism threads itself through prose that trusts women’s perceptions even when their voices tremble; that love—for friends, for family, for a flawed homeland—acquires honour only when it refuses to excuse cruelty. Their eyes agree on one point at least. The tongue can twist, but the gaze that keeps watching eventually reshapes the world it sees.